Dick Cheney should have died behind bars, haunted by the ghosts of his victims

italiatelegraph

Hossam el-Hamalawy

The fluorescent light in the Abu Ghraib cell flickers over the concrete floor stained with blood and human waste. Cables snake from the ceiling. A hooded figure, arms stretched out, stands on a box, his balance the only thing between him and electrocution. The stench of fear and humiliation hangs heavy, thicker than the Baghdad heat outside. These rooms were not anomalies or accidents of war. They were extensions of an ideology that sanctified cruelty in the name of security. And at the centre of that ideology stood Dick Cheney.

Few figures have reshaped the modern Middle East as destructively as the former US vice president. His fingerprints are on every stage of the post-9/11 descent: the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the dismantling of international law, the normalisation of torture, and the entrenchment of a global security architecture that elevated impunity to doctrine.

Cheney’s career stands as a reminder that barbarism does not always arrive in chaos. Sometimes, it comes in a tailored suit and speaks of freedom.

The architect of endless war
When the two towers fell on 11 September 2001, Cheney saw not tragedy but opportunity. He pushed for immediate war in Afghanistan, then for regime change in Iraq. Intelligence was twisted, dissenters silenced, and a compliant media amplified every lie about weapons of mass destruction.

The invasion that followed killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, destabilised an entire region, and paved the way for sectarian conflict that continues to burn. Afghanistan became the longest war in US history, ending with the Taliban’s return and a country in ruins.

For Cheney, these were not failures but necessary costs of remaking the world in America’s image. He spoke of pre-emption, of taking the fight “to the enemy,” but what he built was an empire of occupation and death. The Brown University Costs of War project estimates the post-9/11 wars have claimed over 4.5 million lives, directly and indirectly. Yet to the end, Cheney remained unrepentant, insisting he would “do it again in a minute.”

Cheney’s logic was simple and terrifying: if there was even a one percent chance of a threat to the US, it must be treated as a certainty. This “one percent doctrine” gave birth to a global regime of kidnapping, rendition, and torture. The CIA’s black sites, from Thailand to Poland, were the physical embodiment of his worldview.

Men were disappeared, beaten, waterboarded, and left broken. Abu Ghraib was the tip of an iceberg that extended from Guantanamo Bay to secret cells scattered across friendly dictatorships in the Middle East.

When confronted with the evidence, Cheney did not deny it; he justified it. “We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side,” he said shortly after 9/11. It was a rare moment of honesty.

He turned the “dark side” into official policy, eroding the Geneva Conventions and teaching governments worldwide that torture could be rebranded as “enhanced interrogation.” What the US once condemned became its own standard practice. The moral authority it claimed to defend evaporated under the glow of interrogation lamps.

Empire of oil and arms
To understand Cheney’s wars, one must follow the money. Before returning to government, he was CEO of Halliburton, one of the world’s largest oilfield services companies. Under his watch, Halliburton subsidiaries received billions in no-bid contracts to rebuild Iraq, contracts drawn up before the invasion even began.

The occupation was as much a privatisation project as it was a war. Every bomb dropped created another opportunity for reconstruction profit.

The lines between the public and private blurred until they disappeared. Cheney’s administration presided over a massive transfer of wealth to defence contractors, oil firms, and private security companies like Blackwater.

The wars he helped unleash became self-perpetuating economies, endless conflict sustaining endless enrichment. The blood of Iraqis, Afghans, and others greased the gears of a military-industrial complex that Cheney had spent a lifetime serving.

However, Cheney was not acting alone. He was the steely executor of a broader neoconservative vision that sought to remake the Middle East through shock and awe.

Alongside Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and others in the Project for the New American Century, Cheney believed the US could impose “democracy” at gunpoint. Iraq was to be the model, a liberated, compliant state that would anchor an American century in the region.

Instead, the invasion produced an apocalypse. The disintegration of the country’s institutions, the rise of militias, and the destruction of social infrastructure created a vacuum filled by chaos and extremism.

The same ideology that claimed to extinguish terrorism became its most potent fuel. From Mosul to Kabul, the ghosts of Cheney’s wars still roam, sectarian bloodbaths, drone strikes, and shattered states standing as monuments to imperial hubris.

Friends of autocrats
Even as he preached democracy, Cheney endorsed the world’s worst tyrants. Saudi Arabia remained a close ally; its oil wealth and repression were never questioned. Egypt, under Hosni Mubarak, was a key partner in the extraordinary rendition program, hosting CIA detainees in its torture chambers.

The regimes that tortured on behalf of the US learned that brutality carried no consequences, only rewards. The so-called “war on terror” became a convenient excuse for dictators to crush dissent and expand their security apparatuses, all under Washington’s approving gaze.

Cheney’s foreign policy was less about exporting democracy than outsourcing torture. His alliances fortified the very autocracies whose existence guaranteed the Middle East would remain trapped between despotism and despair.

It is impossible to quantify the full cost of Cheney’s policies, but the numbers tell part of the story. The invasion of Iraq alone killed between 600,000 and one million people, according to various estimates. Millions more were displaced, creating one of the largest refugee crises in modern history. In Afghanistan, tens of thousands of civilians died, many in drone strikes or night raids. Entire generations grew up amid occupation, poverty, and foreign domination.

Join us on WhatsApp
The psychological toll is harder to measure. Cheney’s wars normalised a politics of fear and revenge. They birthed a generation of jihadists, strengthened surveillance states, and discredited the very idea of liberal democracy in the Arab world.

His legacy is not confined to the past; it lives on in every checkpoint, every drone buzzing overhead, every dissident disappeared in the name of “security.”

Back to the dungeon
Two decades after Abu Ghraib, the images still burn: the naked bodies, the laughter of guards, the hooded man on the box. They are not aberrations but mirrors reflecting the moral collapse of an empire.

Cheney’s defenders insist he kept America safe. But safety bought with mass murder and torture is not security; it is rot. The Middle East continues to live with the consequences of his choices, broken states, militarised societies, and a deep cynicism toward the West’s hollow talk of human rights.

If history is ever written by the victims rather than the victors, Cheney’s name will not be remembered as a statesman’s. It will stand beside those who believed cruelty could be rationalised, that violence could build order. His legacy is not the spread of democracy but the normalisation of terror from above.

In the end, the story of Dick Cheney is the story of a world that mistook domination for leadership.

The dungeon in Abu Ghraib may now be silent, but the system it symbolised endures, in every war justified by fear, every autocrat embraced in the name of stability, every tortured body hidden from view. And as long as that system survives, so does the shadow of the man who turned torture into policy.